Playfish expands to San Francisco

Facebook gaming expert Playfish is to open a new studio in San Francisco.

It will be the firm’s fourth development outfit, following offices in London, Beijing and Norway. The firm already has a biz dev office in San Francisco.

The company, one of the biggest players in the fast-growing gaming audience playing on mobile and social networks, said it will draw from the ‘Bay Area’s considerable talent resources to create original social games for friends to play together on platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, iPhone and Android’.

In a statement the firm said: "Tapping into the Bay Area’s world-renown talent base of programmers, artists and engineers will enable Playfish to further bolster its leadership position within the category."

Playfish’s games have been played and installed over 135m times. The firm currently has over 50 million monthly active players across its nine games, resulting in more than 1 billion game play sessions each month.

The company’s three most popular Facebook games, Pet Society, Restaurant City and Country Story, attracted more than 32 million players this past August alone.

Kristian Segerstrale, CEO and co-founder of Playfish, added: “Playfish and the Bay Area are both known for their cultures of excellence, attracting the best and brightest talent and a San Francisco studio enables us to benefit from the region’s skilled workforce.

“Through our new team in San Francisco we plan to extend Playfish’s creative and collaborative culture and find new sources of inspiration in our mission to change the way the world plays games.”

Playfish’s Segerstrale will be talking at the London Games Conference, which focuses on digital distribution – it’s the first event of its kind to focus on this fast-growing area of the games industry. An early bird rate on passes is still available – contact Rob.Baker@intentmedia.co.uk to find out more.